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Table of Contents PROMOTING MEDIA LITERACY IN INDONESIA ........................................................................................... 2 USING RSS AND GOOGLE READER FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING .................................................... 4 USING WIKI AS COLLABORATIVE TOOL ....................................................................................................... 6 MAKING MUSIC WITH DIGITAL TOOLS ......................................................................................................... 8 HOW TO INCREASE STUDENTS’ MOTIVATION ........................................................................................ 10
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Promoting Media Literacy in Indonesia In Indonesia, Media Literacy is still a new concept for society. Not many Indonesian people realize how important this literacy to be part as curriculum in schools. Indonesian Department of National Education has not yet recognized this as a main key for nurturing smart students. The development of information and technology is growing fast but schools have not ready yet for that. Therefore, I have a plan that after finishing my master program and return to Faculty of Teacher Training and Pedagogy in Indonesia, I will write a proposal to my dean and try to promote the idea about the importance of teaching Media Literacy class for students teachers. In order to teach the class in a meaningful way, I prefer to follow activities that I have already learned in Media Literacy class that I took last term and combine it with Lie-Search Presentation strategy that is developed by William Sewell (2010) in his journal article about integrating secondary reading standard and media literacy education. First, students should learn about five core concept and five key questions of media literacy about authorship, format, audience, content, and purpose of media message from Center for Media Literacy (CML MediaLit Kit). I will bring examples of media message that they usually watch and heard from television, radio, newspaper, internet, etc. Then they will try to analyze those media messages by using those questions. Kinds of media message that they should analyze can be ads, issues, news, pictures, fliers, etc. The main point here, I will encourage my students to think critically by answering questions related to the information we try to analyze. Then they will do Lie search presentation project from Sewell (2010). In this activity students have to create a media message that tell lie about recent issues. They will learn from this activity about techniques of manipulating media message. The media message that they will create should looks real and believable. They may use Adobe Photoshop, Movie Maker, or other kinds of software. Then they
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will do presentation about the hoax media message that they have already created to the class. At the end of term, I will give individual test on analyzing media message in class.
References: CML MediaLit Kit. (2002-2010). CML Framework. Retrieved from http://www.medialit.org/cml-framework Sewell, W. (2010). Integrating secondary reading standards and media literacy education. Journal of Media Literacy Education, 141-145. Retrieved from http://www.jmle.org
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Using RSS and Google Reader for Teaching and Learning Google reader is a useful application for collecting any information from any websites or blogs which provide RSS feed. I can use it to keep receiving new information quickly from those websites or blogs without visiting them. Another benefit that I get from using Google reader is that there are many interesting information that I found in blogs related to the usage of technology in education. Therefore, this is an important medium for me as a teacher to follow the information. Google reader can also be used for teaching and learning activity. It can help me to collect information about my students’ posts or comments in my blogs or in their own blogs within just in seconds. In this case, students can create their own blogs and posting their reflective journal, assignments, or problems in learning. Then, I can follow their posts, give comments and find solutions related to my students’ problems. Thus, I can use Google reader to collect updated information from my students’ blogs about their progress in learning. As the result, it can help me to evaluate teaching and learning process in my class. However, in weighing the cost benefit of using Google reader, I found two weaknesses of it. First, Google reader cannot function well in certain smart phones. I use Sony Ericsson P1i smart phone and I cannot read the information that I have subscribed from my phone. In fact, using RSS feed reader in mobile phone is beneficial related to time efficiency although the pleasure of viewing text in the phone cannot be as comfortable as in desktop computer. Second, for small class, managing RSS feed is easy. However, in big class, subscribing and giving comments will take more time and effort. In order to subscribe, we have to do it one by one. In order to give comments, we cannot do it directly from Google reader. Regarding those
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weaknesses, I hope that in the future, Google reader can be more efficient and compatible with any smart phones.
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Using Wiki as Collaborative Tool In my future, I will absolutely use wiki to help my students to learn how to collaborate their ideas or projects with their friends. I believe that teaching collaboration skill will be very important for my students’ success in their future. If we refer back to previous material about framework of 21st century learning, it is described that one of the students’ outcome is learning and innovation skill that includes critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity. It means that collaboration is part of the skill that 21st century students have to have. I believe that the ability to collaborate ideas with other people will be needed for students’ future careers. Another advantage of wiki websites is that it also helps students to be more active in sharing ideas. In Indonesia, I sometimes taught some classes consist of 40-45 students. In class there were only a few students active in discussion and sharing idea because many of them were shy to talk in front of many people. Wiki can facilitate these students to be more active in sharing their ideas. It is also can help me as teacher to assess my students’ participation in class. Many times I found out that in doing group projects, some students just relied on one or two particular students in their own group and they got similar scores because I did not notice that until one student told me about that. Therefore, Wiki can help me to decrease any cheating during group discussion and give data about students’ contribution on a project given. The history page in wiki sites can provide information about changes or updates made by students as part of their contribution on a group project. By referring to this history page I can recognize students who are actively contribute ideas and their efforts in solving problems on a project. During my exploration of how teachers use educational wiki websites, I tried to evaluate three wikis websites project below:
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1. http://6thgrade-07.pbworks.com/w/page/FrontPage 2. http://bergmannscience.wikispaces.com/ 3. http://mrsibrahim.wikispaces.com/ The first wiki website provides exercises in English class for 6th grade students. There are links to several online quizzes related to a book that students read in class. Providing link to quizzes is a good way to enrich the materials on the website. The organization is simple and accessible by 6th graders because there are links on the sidebars that can lead students to certain categories of related materials. The second wiki website contains information related to science for middle school students. The good thing about this wiki website is that there are some interactive videos that include links to further materials and other related information. This wiki website also applies various additional applications to enrich the materials on the page such as Google calendar and Prezi presentation. This is attractive enough and appropriate for middle schools students. The links are also well organized and accessible. The third wiki website contains class materials for second graders. The appearance of the website is less attractive compare to the two previous wiki websites. However, the teacher arranges categories and links in order based on alphabet. I think that is part of the teacher’s strategy to help second graders students to understand how to find the materials easily by coordinating their view on the desired character for easy instruction. This is interesting wiki website and really appropriate for second graders students. However, it will be more attractive if there are more pictures, video, and related educational flash games added.
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Making Music with Digital Tools Music is art. It is also a good media for teaching and learning especially when we want to teach or learn foreign language. By using Garage Band software, I can compose music or song easily and use it as a teaching media. The song that I have already made using Garage band is one of examples of material for teaching English as a foreign language for beginners. The title of the song is “are you happy?” From this essay I’d like to give an example of how I use the song as material for teaching English, my objective of creating this song, procedures in teaching, problems I had in the past, and future planning to improve the song. The main objective of creating this song is to help my students remember the structure or rules of comparison and superlative sentences. I believe that song can help students to remember rules of the sentences easily. However, before I explain more about the application of this song in classroom, here is the musical note of the song that I created.
Before I taught them this song, I explained the rules of creating comparison and superlative sentences to my students. Then, I taught them how to pronounce the sentences together. So, they repeated after me. After they learned how to pronounce the lyrics of the song, I gave them example how to sing the song. Then, I played the guitar and we sang the song together. After, we sang the song several times; I gave them some questions to identify the structure of the sentences. Finally, I gave them assignment to create their own sentences that can
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be appropriate with the song. When the first time I taught my students this song, they enjoyed the song very much. Based on my experience in using the song as learning material, I found a difficulty in efficiency. I brought my own guitar in class to teach them about comparison and superlative rules. There were some weaknesses of using real instrument in class. First, it is not efficient. Second, I have limitation in classroom management. Third, some mistakes in playing guitar may happen since I’m not a professional player. Therefore, by composing this song using garage band, it may help reducing my problem in efficiency because I can just bring may own laptop and play the song with loud speaker in classroom. In the future, I’m going to make some changes to this song related to its beat and tempo because the song that I have already created has a very fast tempo. Moreover, in order to make it more enjoyable for class activity, I have to decrease the volume of my voice so that students’ voice will be dominant when they sing it together. I will also add one version of this song that has no voice track in it so that I can use it as assignment for students to create their own sentences and put their sentences as lyrics for the song.
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How to Increase Students’ Motivation
I read a research article written by Lee, J., McInerney, D., Liem, G., & Ortiga, Y. (2010) entitled “The relationship between future goals and achievement goal orientations: An intrinsic-extrinsic motivation perspective.” In this article, they define future goals as “a cognitive representation of what it is that a student seeks to achieve in his or her future.” According to them, based on the literatures that they used, there are five categories of future goals. They are fame-oriented (become famous person), wealth (money and other material possessions), having good jobs or careers, society (contributing or making impact to society), and family (providing support to the family). They also divided achievement goal oriented into two categories. They are mastery goal orientation and performance goal orientation. Mastery goal is related to intrinsic motivation. In this case students believe that efforts lead to success. They have self-motivation to develop new skills, try to understand their work, improving their level of competence or achieving a sense of mastery. Performance goal is related to extrinsic motivation. It is about one’s ability and sense of self-worth. In this case students compare themselves with others and they wants to be better than others by having the success with little effort. This is a relational study. It focused on finding out these research questions: “Do different future goals have differential relationships with achievement goal orientations? Specifically, are intrinsic future goals related more strongly to an intrinsic achievement goal orientation than to an extrinsic achievement goal orientation? Conversely, are extrinsic future goals more strongly associated with an extrinsic achievement goal orientation than with an intrinsic achievement goal orientation?” The population of the research is 5773 Singaporean secondary school students with mixed ability and cultural background. 69.6% are Chinese, 20.1% are Malay, and 3.8% Indian, and 6.5% were others. In order to collect data, they used questionnaires. The result shows that there is a strong positive correlation of intrinsic future goals (career-,
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society-, and family-oriented) to mastery-approach goal orientation rather than to performance-approach goal orientation. On the other hand, extrinsic future goals (fame- and wealth-oriented) had a strong positive correlation to performance-approach goal orientation rather than to mastery-approach goal orientation. Thus, the research suggests that to increase students’ motivation, teachers should encourage students to adopt mastery-approach goal and intrinsic future goals. Based on the research, I could see that students will be self-motivated in learning if they use intrinsic achievement goal (mastery goal) and intrinsic future goal (career, society, and family oriented) Therefore, I learned that firstly, it is important to design the goal of learning that match students’ intrinsic motivation. Students between 14 – 18 years old has already had dreams about careers and expectation in the future. As a university teacher, I believe that if secondary school students understood how important is education to achieve their future goal, students in higher education even have stronger motivation in learning to gain better future. Secondly, the research indicates that intrinsic motivation is better than extrinsic motivation. Thus, I learn that learning will be effective if I can relate teaching materials with students’ future goals.
Lee, J., McInerney, D., Liem, G., & Ortiga, Y. (2010). The relationship between future goals and achievement goal orientations: An intrinsic-extrinsic motivation perspective. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 35(4), 264-79. doi: 10.1016/j.cedpsych.2010.04.004